Friday, August 22, 2008

Free Virtual Office Space!

Our project has received funding to develop forward with professional assistance, yay! For the rest of the summer and some of Fall term though, we've got temporary structures on the island- one of these is an office tower, that we invite you as Oregon Community College faculty or staff to come in and claim a spot to set up your own virtual space in Second Life.

A few guidelines:

-Some of the tower spaces are already busy being used, and it should be obvious by objects being present in the space when you get there. We're creating a system that will check each space out by the week, but until this gets completed, we're going by the honor system. If you are curious about which space you may use in the tower, please IM or send a note card to me, MonicaMarlo Martinek- I'm happy to assist!

-Please keep your prim use amount to about 150 prims. What's a prim you ask? Prims are primitive objects, the shapes that make everything in Second Life. A single item, like a chair or table, can have multiple prims. You can right click on an item and see how many prims it takes to make the item by the number of objects it lists from the general tab. Admittedly, 150 prims isn't very much, but we have an island limit of 15,000 and want to be sure everyone who wants to participate can.

-Island structures will be going away at some point during fall term to make way for version one of our island design plans. We will give you two weeks notice once this date is announced, and you won't lose any of your items when this happens, but they may be returned to your inventory all at once.

Keep in mind as you explore with us on Oregon Community Colleges island that we're all learning together- for example- I take the greatest care to assure experiments conducted on the island will have minimal impact, but as a space for pioneer exploration, it's difficult to give guarantees that all will be stable from day to day.